Where Do We Go After Garner, Brown, Graham and Gurley?

by Rob Silverman-Ascher          

            In my short life thus far, I’ve frequently found myself asking how we as a nation are safe. Who keeps us safe? How safe do they keep us?  Why do they keep us safe? When I was very young, I took it on faith that all police forces keep everyone safe everywhere. But the answer to one question has my view: do the police protect us equally?

            While growing up in lower Manhattan, I would always see police doing their jobs, from patrolling to making arrests. But then, on September 11th, 2001, the police took on a greater significance. I was home when the Twin Towers were hit. My preschool hadn’t started yet. But, in a matter of minutes, dust started flying through the air. My mom had it in her mind to take me to a friend’s house, just so we could get away from it. On our way to my friend’s house, we saw a station set up by the NYPD. They were checking IDs and clearing people to pass 14th Street. This fueled my childhood respect for the police. I could tell that, in the time of our shared tragedy, they were really trying to make things safe.

            I don’t quite remember when I first became aware of police brutality. Even in the relatively lower class neighborhood of my middle school, the police presence was nurturing, familial even. But I know that I was aware of the bad that our “protectors” could perpetrate. Maybe I saw their guns and assumed that sometimes people died at their hands. To a kid, a cop’s mission is to “stop the bad guys”. As a child, I was aware that this was never so black-and-white. From an early age, I was aware of the stories of Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima, two men of African descent who were abused at the hands of New York City cops. Louima was savagely beaten and sodomized, and Diallo was killed. Even though the police were supposed to be our protectors, I think I realized that this was not a perfect system.

            The first time that I was truly outraged by the death of an innocent at the hands of a commanding force was, like many others, Trayvon Martin’s death. He was not that much older than me, something that I continually reflected on in the wake of his killing. Initially, I was incensed at George Zimmerman for doing the job of the police. How could he take crime into his own hands? What gave him the right? Why couldn’t he just let cops investigate? Surely, if the police had investigated, they would have just seen a young African-American kid wearing a hoodie walking home. Until the lack of prosecution, I just chalked it up to the perceived racism of the South (there goes my Northern elitism!). But, when George Zimmerman walked away scot-free, I was shocked to see that the justice system didn’t really care at all about Trayvon. Sure, the “Stand Your Ground” law protected Zimmermann, but the jury really could have investigated the fact that this was a 17-year-old kid texting and invalidated the “Stand Your Ground” law.

            And now we are in 2014. After the death of Michael Brown this summer at the hands of an officer in Ferguson, Missouri, I was more aware of how shockingly racially charged police killings have been lately. Many people attributed his death to his robbery of a deli, but his stopping was not connected to this. Officer Darren Wilson stopped him because he was not walking on the sidewalk. A question that I have frequently thought about was, “if I, a white kid in New York City, was seen by a cop walking in the street, would anything happen?” My answer always shocks me. The odds are, I would not get stopped. I would also not be killed. But, for a while, I chalked it up to the cultural practices of that small town in Missouri. But in July 2014 on Staten Island, a man was choked to death by cops in front of a bodega after an argument with police He was 6 feet, 4 inches, 350 pounds, and selling loose cigarettes. The fact that three plainclothes officers sought him out and brought him down surprised me. All for selling loose cigarettes? That was where I found the answer to my vital question. The police do not protect equally. Or even treat people equally. Regardless of the legal jargon that gives police officers immunity, there is an issue that Officers Wilson and Pantaleo were not prosecuted. Regardless of Michael Brown or Eric Garner’s race, they should not be dead for their minor offenses.

            Focusing on Eric Garner and Michael Brown’s cases barely scratch the surface. Ramarley Graham went to turn around in order to put his hands up and was killed in the Bronx in 2012. Akai Gurley was killed in a dark stairwell by an officer doing a “vertical sweep”, essentially searching his project house for criminal activity without a warrant. Akai was collateral damage. And finally, there’s the story of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old with a toy gun who was killed in Cleveland

            Asking the question of whether or not the police protect equally should not end up as a condemnation of police officers. It should instead formulate discussions of what can be done to fix the issues that are plaguing our police systems. It has been hard for me to reconcile the two images of police officers in my mind: the saviors and security guards of post-9/11 New York juxtaposed with the over reactive killers of these police brutality cases. There needs to be a way to ensure that officers are more frequently the former than the latter. When I ask myself if we are protected equally, I am saddened when I look at the precedent. But I have hope for future changes.